Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 23

The Phantom Menace is better than I remember. It’s well constructed, and there are incredible subtleties and thematic elements hidden among the flashy (and cheesy) A-plot. It’s about dualities, symbiosis, and most of all, misdirection. An elaborately costumed decoy queen, an invasion waged to maneuver the Senate into giving Palpatine more power, and so on. And the movie is that too: a big flashy effects and battle and comedy extravaganza in front of a master manipulator quietly going about his scheming.

I mean, yeah, the dialogue isn’t very good, and there are all the horrible stereotypes, but the core of the story is thematically solid.

Jellyfin works great for playing music across my wireless LAN, and it stays on my wireless LAN. It doesn’t require me to connect to a remote cloud account, or constantly push me to buy a subscription to a remote streaming service. I tried Jellyfin out after getting frustrated with Plex doing both of those things.

The server turned out to be easier to install than Plex, allowing me to set it up on my Raspberry Pi without hooking up a local display+keyboard or resorting to SSH tunneling. The initial import handled albums better. And best of all, I didn’t have to hook up my local server to a cloud account.

The players are a little tricky to find, because they’re not on the download page (that’s just for the server), they’re on the clients page. That’s where you’ll find links to various store pages for Android, iOS, Roku, FireTV, and so on. And way down at the bottom, a link to the Github page for the desktop player, with Windows, macOS and Linux installers. (Because the installers aren’t signed by a “known developer,” you may need to jump through some hoops to give it permission on current macOS systems).

On the plus side: It works, the players are easy to find and install for multiple platforms and devices, and the server can even run on a Raspberry Pi.

On the minus side: You have to sign into their cloud account to do most things. And it’s constantly trying to push you into purchasing a subscription. Even if you’re only using it with your local collection.

If you want to use it for remote streaming, that’s one thing. But I just want to listen to my own library of music on my own network. It shouldn’t have to connect to a remote service, sending who knows what local data, just for that. I ended up using Jellyfin instead.

(Oh, and installing on a Pi? You need to either hook up a display to it or use an ssh tunnel to complete setup if you’re trying to run it as a headless server.)

A welcome return to the world of A Turn of Light (though shorter!)

One of the things Czerneda does really well in this series is balance the fantasy elements so that they’re both wondrous and dangerous at the same time. Like the Turn that happens daily wherever the normal and magical worlds intersect, it’s just a shift in which facet we’re seeing at the time.

There’s a political story dealing with fallout from the previous novel, but it’s a paper-thin wrapper around the real story: a character-driven family drama about healing from trauma and learning to handle uncontrollable magic and what dangers it might unlock.

A fast read with an intriguing concept that reverses multiple YA fantasy tropes: It’s a non-magical boarding school for teens who have experienced magic. And it’s not about the adventures they have going through the portal to a fantasy world, but about how they handle the trauma of coming back to the mundane one. The characters are interesting, and I’d like to read more about them, but halfway through it turns into a murder mystery. That gives it a plot, but it comes at the expense of the characterization. (And some of the characters.) It was entertaining, though, and it does make me want to check out the second book.